Occupy Beijing

In the spring and summer of 1900, bands of ordinary Chinese began to spread across northern China, protesting against and attacking the representatives of an imperial world that was remaking their country in the name of modernity and progress. The so-called “Boxers” were mostly leaderless and connected only by their shared desire to resist and rebel.

The empires fought back. Caught in the middle was the tottering Qing Dynasty of China, led uneasily by the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had dominated Chinese politics for half a century. Watching was the rest of the world, caught by the daily reports from journalists embedded with the western forces.

I wrote a book about that summer of 1900. Writing a book takes a while. There are numerous way stations. There’s the research and the writing, the research that results from the writing, the rewriting, the editing, the rewriting that results from the editing, and the re-editing. For most of that time, the project is essentially mine and mine alone, though I did share some of that process on this blog. Only towards the end of the project do I turn things over, to the editors, to the publisher, to Amazon, to the reviewers, and, most importantly, to the public. They make of the book what they can, what they want to, and what they will. By that final stage, it is more the reader’s book than mine.

Silbey’s concise, lively account of an early experiment in multilateral intervention analyzes the imperialist motivations that led a mixed army of eight Western nations into a brief but bloody military expedition to suppress the Boxer movement, which spread across the plains of northern China in 1900, lashing out at the foreign powers that had carved the country into spheres of influence as the Qing dynasty wheezed toward its decline

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22 comments

Publisher’s Weekly is an intellectually bankrupt front for Big Publishing, a lobby no better nor any worse than Big Tobacco or Big Child Slavery. That said, congratulations on your empty victory. (Also, I kid. A positive review in PW is, as I’m sure you know, a very big deal. Well done, friend. I look forward to reading the book.)

@eric Oops. One’s on its way to you now. @oaklove& Colin Thanks! @lj There’s a Kindle edition coming out at the same time (am I answering your question? I didn’t quite understand it) @TF Thanks! (Weird Warfare?)

@TF They were both imperial homelands and building large armies for the first time (in at least a generation or two). Bringing in the colonies would create an enormously larger task, both in terms of motivation, experience, and the preservation of their experiences. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be useful (there’s a good book to be written (someone will now come up with an example) on the experience of Filipinos fighting for the United States, 1902-1945) but it’s too much for one book.

That’s my point, actually – the US and UK (and France, Italy, and Russia, among the allies) engaged in full mobilization through conscription for field service (in the US and UK, overseas service); the forces raised by the dominions and empire were volunteers (as they were, essentially, in the Second World War, as well).

This was only the second time in history the US used conscription, and the British never had. I think that’s the best parallel, actually, depending on what your frame of “imperial homeland” is aimed at…the US certainly had no interest in taking on any of the League of Nations mandates, after all.

In terms of organization and mobilization, the British and American armies’ experience in the Great War had more in common (for the first time ever, in British history, and only for the second time in US history) with the continental powers.

This was a major change from the reliance on regulars and volunteers, which had been the Anglo-American experience throughout the modern era, unlike the French, Germans, etc. Even in the South African war, although the forces mobilized by the British for overseas service were larger than ever, they remained a regular/volunteer mix – they were not conscripts.

The doughboys and tommies had a different experience than the Canadians, Australians, Indians, South Africans, etc, – the colonials/imperials were volunteers (whether driven by economic need or not); they were not, ultimately, conscript armies, which the Americans and Britons were…

The British used the voluntary system for the first two years of the war, and half of the soldiers who fought in the war were actually volunteers rather than conscripts (about 5 million each). In some parts of the UK (Ireland for example) the system remained voluntary throughout the war. It was volunteers who fought at the Somme.

The colonial armies are also a mixed bag. The volunteer system in Australia (which was raising a big army for the first time) was much different than that in India (where it was the regular Indian Army of long-service professionals that sent most of the fighting units).

So the points of similarity I’m focusing on between the US and UK were that they were imperial homelands (ie the self-perceived center of a larger political unit, albeit much more so for the UK than the US) and that creating these large armies was a big and new thing for both of them.

I’m building the work I did in The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, which focused on the creation of that first large voluntary army in the UK, and in A War of Frontier and Empire, which looked at the American military experience up to 1902 as it led into the Philippine-American War.

Sounds very interesting – in the US, the debates among mobilization approaches focusing on the regulars, the National Guard, and the National Army concept, much less TR’s abortive Volunteer concept, are pretty compelling as a case study of mobilization in wartime, akin to the British debates in 1914-16 (and a good contrast with the British wartime mobilization in 1939-40 and the US peacetime mobilization in 1940-41).

Can’t offer much on sources, (Paul Fussell seems like the obvious beginning, despite the intellectual history focus) but I picked up JC Nelson’s study of Company D, 1st/28th Infantry, 1st Division recently (the 28th was Clarence Huebner’s regiment) and have been impressed so far – it is a journalistic account and something of a “found memoir,” based on his grandfather’s recollections, but his work in primary sources is impressive. I don’t know if he is making it available for scholars, or if it has been archived yet, but it reads like he found descendents of all the battalion officers down to the company commanders, many ncos, and good selection of private soldiers – pretty impressive, and much of what he found was unpublished.

Doesn’t sound like you are looking at fiction, work I’ve always wondered what Myrer’s source material for the WW I section of “Once and Eagle” – the protagonists was archetypes, of course, but the unnamed division that Damon, Dev, Caldwell, and rest serve in sure reads like the 1st…given the impact the novel has had on the officer’s corps since the 1970s, might be interesting to see what Myrer’s sources were…

I don’t disagree with Samet’s criticism, but then again, Nelson’s work is not academic history – he clearly subtitles it “a story of the Great War” and his sourcing is journalistic, not academic. Given that, it is a pretty impressive work in terms of the research and is well-written in (again) a journalistic style.